This week’s topic for both my grad and undergrad human rights courses is “foreign policy and human rights promotion.”  On the list of readings-not-on-last-year’s-syllabus is this little gem: “Enter the Dragon!  An Empirical Analysis of Chinese versus US Arms Transfers to Autocrats and Violators of Human Rights, 1989-2006” by Indra de Soysa and Paul Midford.  It appeared in last December’s issue of ISQ.  Drop what you are doing now and read it!  Seriously.  It is thought -provoking, made me want to download their replication dataset and play with it before class, and made my students argue aggressively with each other in class.[1]

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